ScooptWords blog

Bloggers be journalists, journalists be bloggers

I'm writing a mini-series of features for the excellent journalism.co.uk site. Each article will focus on a journalist who blogs. Among the journalists I'm thinking of featuring are a couple who started out as bloggers. I hope they'll be up for interviews in the series. So, how does this tie in with ScooptWords? Well... I was, in part, asked to write this series because of one of my blogs, along with my passion for blogs/blogging and last, and probably least, because I'm a journalist. This goes for other commissions I've had. In a later post I intend to highlight the amount of work I have been asked to do because of my blog. This experience, which is far from unique among bloggers, helped us understand that if we aggregated, packaged and promoted good quality blog writing to editors we would find a warm welcome at enough publications to make it work. Journalism.co.uk can also advise you on How to get started as a freelance journalist.

Citizen journalist for a week

On the road this week, so posting will be haphazard as I flit in and out of wifi, but this just caught my eye at the BBC,

Citizen journalist Frankie Roberto wanted to find out more about what separates professional reporters from amateur enthusiasts such as himself - so he gave up a week's holiday to spend time in the BBC News website offices. What did he find?

Sales and mo' press

Matt Whipp from PCPro.co.uk runs a short piece on ScooptWords,

It's a straightforward service, but with blogging by its very nature a public entity, is there any demand? Blogs are already a well-known and used source for the media industry: journalists don't have a special sauce for editorial that exists purely by virtue of their title, but the most straightforward way for a publisher to benefit from a well-read blogger might be to simply hire them full stop.

Graham Holliday, ScooptWords managing editor, told us: 'The thing is, some blogs - by NO means all - are producing material every bit as good as professional journalists. Our research, and our instinct tells us, some would like a commercial route to market for their words. However, most bloggers are not clued up re: copyright, contracts, fees, territorial rights and the like. That's where we help.

'Those editors who are blog savvy have been very eager to contact us and enquire about what's available now and what will be available down the line. We're still in beta, we only 'stealth' launched a little over two weeks ago... However, we already have a lot of editorial interest and we've made sales. It's all very early days, but we're really happy with the way this is shaping up and the reaction from the bloggers has been overwhelmingly positive.'

Thanks Matt.

Costcutters

After a lot of discussion among all at Scoopt and, not least on the blogs talking about us and with us, we have decided to drop the 50% initial ScooptWords fee for words. The fee is now set at 25% and will remain at that level until we begin to see a clear picture of where the market is and what it needs. With the first official press release out in the wild, it's great that we have been able to incorporate your thoughts at such a very early stage in our development. So please, keep chatting away about the service on your blog. We try to pick up on conversations as they happen using a combination of Google Alerts, Technorati, Sphere custom feeds and co.mments. After much debate in the comments on various blogs, Scoopt MD Kyle announced the reduction in the ScooptWords cut in the comments at Problogger - before we mentioned it anywhere else. We're already making sales in beta mode - which is far earlier than we expected. And clearly that's great news for you and us.

Press Release

Scoopt, The World's First Citizen Journalism Picture Agency, Now Selling Blog Content To The Mainstream Media

Monetising blogs: www.scoopt.com/words

Press Dispensary - 23 June 2006 - Scoopt.com, the 'citizen journalism' picture agency that gives the public the power to sell photos to the press, announces the launch of ScooptWords, its blog syndication service. Now bloggers can sell their writing to the mainstream media.

Graham Holliday, ScooptWords managing editor, explains: "There's a lot of great blog content out there. Some of it is every bit as good as content produced by professional journalists. However, there's no obvious route to market for the blogger or way to buy content for the editor. So we launched ScooptWords to make this connection. We offer bloggers a simple, free way to flag their content for sale – and we give publishers the means to license that content commercially. It's a win-win situation."

ScooptWords membership is free. A blogger simply registers one or more blogs with the scheme and carries a ScooptWords button on their blog(s). Any editor can then click this button to license content commercially at a fair market rate. The blogger receives 75% of the sales revenue.

ScooptWords is working closely with Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org), leading provider of flexible copyright licenses for creative works. ScooptWords believes that it is essential to preserve and encourage the free exchange of content for non-commercial use, and important that bloggers understand the different ways in which they can permit their content to be used. Creative Commons is the perfect partner for non-commercial licensing.

Creative Commons spokesperson Eric Steuer comments: "Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work can be used non-commercially; use the ScooptWords badge to let editors know that your writing can be purchased for commercial use. There's so much great blog content being created every day - it'll be very exciting to see how it helps change the way newspapers and magazines are created."

Graham Holliday continues: "At the moment, everyone involved in media, from the small-town blogger with 10 readers to the heads of the world's biggest news organizations, is riding this huge tidal wave of change in media. That wave is just beginning to break and no-one – not the brightest media brains nor the smallest small-town blogger – has any idea what will be left standing once the wave recedes. But we believe that a paying market for good writing will survive. ScooptWords opens that market to everybody."

Notes for editors
Scoopt is a media agency that brokers commercial deals between content creators and content users.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works.

For more information, please contact:

Graham Holliday, managing editor
Email: press@scoopt.com
Phone: 07092 216363
Website: http://www.scoopt.com/words

License your Word docs

One of our key partners, Creative Commons, announce an interesting tie in with Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint applications,

"Microsoft has released a tool for copyright licensing that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft Office applications. The software is available free of charge at Microsoft Office Online and will enable the 400 million users of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint to easily select Creative Commons licenses from directly within the application they are working in." via Creative Commons blog.

Hmmm??? Neat.

ScooptWords interview at Problogger

Darren Rowse of the 24/7 'blogger's-blog', Problogger.net emailed over some questions about ScooptWords. You can read the interview in full at Problogger. We've already had some interesting and useful feedback in the Darren's comment box which we're answering as and when and we look forward to more.

Two weeks of stealth

A brief update of where we are with ScooptWords - a little over two weeks since we slipped into stealthy betaland. Great to see such postive feedback about what we're about. The biggest sticking points thus far are the ScooptWords initial 50% cut on sales and the potential use of your material by a publication without your byline. These are both features we will review over time, but which at the moment we feel are neccesary.

If a byline-less publication wants your words, we want to be able to sell them. We don't want to cut you out of those markets that never run bylines be it from staff journalists, freelance, editors or bloggers. We think it is highly unlikely we will ever need to push any editor to run a byline in a publication that ordinarily prints bylines.

In other movements, we're starting to approach bloggers who haven't already signed up for ScooptWords, but we would very much like to sign up. We're doing this for one reason only - we think we can sell their words. We already have publications and media buyers approaching us for niche content. Remember, we're still in beta and won't fully come out of it until we start aggregating, packaging and pushing to editors. So, please bear with us. We're also having some great converstaions with potential partners. We'll let you know more on those when we know more :)

Where's Web 2.0 heading?

The BBC does a good job getting to grips with Web 2.0, social media, blogs et al in the latest episode of Radio 4's  "In Business". Many of the usual suspects are interviewed here, but Hugh Macleod sums it up the salient mantra on his blog,

"the key point I took away is that the media business is currently in a period of great transition i.e. nobody really knows where the whole thing is going to end up. This inclues big media companies AND "blogging gurus" alike."

You can listen to the feature on the In Business website or head straight to the MP3 file.

More cash from content

If you've signed already up with ScooptWords, or you're thinking about it, it's reasonable enough for us to assume it's because you think you can make cash from your content. Selling blog content is one thing, being commissioned to write a story is another. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger, who earns plenty cash fom his 20 blog empire, regularly dishes out useful tips on advertising, linking, blog design, writing and blog promotion. ProBlogger is well worth with a dig around. A good place to start is by reading How bloggers make money online.